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There is a lot of celebrating going on in mainstream policy circles. The economy is said to be running at full steam with the unemployment rate now below 4 percent. As Clive Crook puts it in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The U.S. expansion has put millions of people back to work and economists agree that the economy is now at or close to full employment.”

Forgotten in all this celebration is the fact that wages remain stagnant. Also forgotten are the millions of workers who are no longer counted as part of the labor force and thus not counted as unemployed.

Forgotten workers

One of the best indicators of the weakness of the current recovery is the labor market status of what is called the core workforce, those ages 25-54. Their core status stems from the fact that, as Jill Mislinski explains, “This cohort leaves out the employment volatility of the high-school and college years, the lower employment of the retirement years and also the age 55-64 decade when many in the workforce begin transitioning to retirement … for example, two-income households that downsize into one-income households.”

The unemployment rate of those 25-54 reached a peak of 9 percent in 2009 before falling steadily to a low of 3.2 percent as of July 2018. However, the unemployment rate alone can be a very misleading indicator of labor market conditions. That is certainly true when it comes to the labor market status of today’s core workforce.

A more revealing measure is the Labor Force Participation Rate, which is defined as the Civilian Labor Force (i.e. the sum of those employed and unemployed) divided by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (i.e. those of working age who are not in the military or institutionalized). Because there can be significant monthly swings in both the numerator and denominator of this measure, the Labor Force Participation Rate shown in the chart below is calculated using a 12-month moving average.

As we can see, the Labor Force Participation Rate for the 25-54 core cohort has sharply declined, from a mid-2000 high of 84.2 percent, down to a low of 81.9 percent in July 2018. Mislinski calculates that:

Based on the moving average, today’s age 25-54 cohort would require 1.6 million additional people in the labor force to match its interim peak participation rate in 2008 and 2.9 million to match the peak rate around the turn of the century.

A related measure of labor market conditions is the Employment-to-Population Ratio, which is defined as the Civilian Employed divided by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population. As we can see in the next chart, the Employment-to-Population Ratio of our core cohort has also declined from its mid-2000 peak.

Again, according to Mislinski,

First the good news: This metric began to rebound from its post-recession trough in late 2012. However, the more disturbing news is that the current age 25-54 cohort would require an increase of 1.2 million employed prime-age participants to match its ratio peak in 2007. To match its mid-2000 peak would require a 3.1 million participant increase.

The takeaway

Both the Labor Force Participation Rate and the Employment-to-Population Ratio are useful measures of the employment intensity of the economy. And in a healthy economy we should expect to see high values for both measures for the 25-54 age cohort. That is especially true for a country like the United States, where the non-market public provision of education, health care, and housing is quite limited, and an adequate retirement depends upon private savings. In other words, people need paid employment to live and these are prime work years.

The decline, over the business cycle, in both the Labor Force Participation Rate and the Employment-to-Population Ratio for our core cohort strongly suggests that our economy is undergoing a profound structural change, with business increasingly organizing its activities in ways that require fewer workers. More specifically, the lower values in these measures mean that millions of prime age workers are being sidelined, left outside the labor market.

It is hard to know what will become of these workers and by extension their families and communities. Moreover, this is not a problem only of the moment. This cohort is still relatively young, and the social costs of being sidelined from employment—and here we are not even considering the quality of that employment—will only grow with age. We can only hope that workers of all ages will eventually recognize that our growing employment problems are the result, not of individual failings, but an increasingly problematic economic system, and begin pushing for its structural transformation.

Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues. Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits. Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.

For example, the federal budget for fiscal year 2018 (which ends on September 30, 2018), included more money for the military than even President Trump requested. Trump had asked for a military budget of $603 billion, a sizeable $25 billion increase over fiscal year 2017 levels; Congress approved $629 billion. Trump had also asked for $65 billion to finance current war fighting, a bump of $5 billion; Congress approved $71 billion. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, which set the target budget for the Department of Defense at this high level, was approved by the Senate in a September 2017 vote of 89-9.

In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill . . . that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”

That Act also called for a further increase in military spending of $16 billion for fiscal year 2019 (which begins October 1, 2018). And, in June 2018, the Senate voted 85 to 10 to authorize that increase, boosting the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2019 total to $716 billion.

This bipartisan embrace of militarism comes at enormous cost for working people. This cost includes cuts in funding for public housing, health care and education; the rebuilding of our infrastructure; basic research and development; and efforts to mitigate climate change. It also includes the militarization of our police, since the military happily transfers its excess or outdated equipment to willing local police departments.

And it also includes a belligerent foreign policy. A case in point: Congress has made clear its opposition to the Trump administration decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and halt war games directed against North Korea, apparently preferring the possibility of a new Korean War. Congress is also trying to pass a law that will restrict the ability of the President to reduce the number of US troops stationed in South Korea.

In brief, the US military industrial complex, including the bipartisan consensus which helps to promote militarism’s popular legitimacy, is one of the most important and powerful foes we must overcome if we are to seriously tackle our ever-growing social, economic, and ecological problems.

The military is everywhere

The US has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, with 135,000 soldiers stationed around the globe. Putting this in perspective, Alice Slater reports that:

only 11 other countries have bases in foreign countries, some 70 altogether. Russia has an estimated 26 to 40 in nine countries, mostly former Soviet Republics, as well as in Syria and Vietnam; the UK, France, and Turkey have four to 10 bases each; and an estimated one to three foreign bases are occupied by India, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

US special forces are deployed in even more countries. According to Nick Turse, as of 2015, these forces were operating in 135 countries, an 80 percent increase over the previous five years. “That’s roughly 70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar.”

This widespread geographic deployment represents not only an aggressive projection of US elite interests, it also provides a convenient rationale for those that want to keep the money flowing. The military, and those that support its funding, always complain that the military needs more funds to carry out its mission. Of course, the additional funds enable the military to expand the reach of its operations, thereby justifying another demand for yet more money.

The US military is well funded

It is no simple matter to estimate of how much we spend on military related activities. The base military budget is the starting point. It represents the amount of the discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense. Then there is the overseas contingency operations fund, which is a separate pool of money sitting outside any budgetary restrictions, that the military receives yearly from the Congress to cover the costs of its ongoing warfare.

It is the combination of the two that most analysts cite when talking about the size of the military budget. Using this combined measure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute finds that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven largest military spenders combined, which are China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan.

As the following chart shows, US military spending (base budget plus overseas contingency operations fund), adjusted for inflation, has been on the rise for some time, and is now higher than at any time other than during the height of the Iraq war. Jeff Stein, writing in the Washington Post, reports that the military’s base budget will likely be “the biggest in recent American history since at least the 1970s, adjusting for inflation.”

As big as it is, the above measure of military spending grossly understates the total. As JP Sottile explains:

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.

William Hartung, an expert on military spending, went agency by agency to expose all the various military-related expenses that are hidden in different parts of the budget. As he points out:

You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal — nuclear warheads — would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget. And you would, of course, be wrong. The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year.

Hartung’s grand total, which includes, among other things, the costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, and the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, is $1.09 trillion, roughly the same as the POGO total cited above. In short, our political leaders are far from forthcoming about the true size of our military spending.

Adding insult to injury, the military cannot account for how it spends a significant share of the funds it is given. A Reuters’ article by Scott Paltrow tells the story:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June [2016] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.” . . .

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money.

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. . . .

For years, the Inspector General – the Defense Department’s official auditor – has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.”

Military spending is big for business

Almost half of the US military budget goes to private military contractors. These military contracts are the lifeblood for many of the largest corporations in America. Lockheed Martin and Boeing rank one and two on the list of companies that get the most money from the government. In 2017 Lockheed Martin reported $51 billion in sales, with $35.2 billion coming from the government. Boeing got $26.5 billion. The next three in line are Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These top five firms captured some $100 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2016.

The Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), United Health Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

Not surprisingly, given how lucrative these contracts are, private contractors work hard to ensure the generosity of Congress. In 2017, for example, 208 defense companies spent almost $100 million to deploy 728 reported lobbyists. Lobbying is made far easier by the fact that more than 80 percent of top Pentagon officials have worked for the defense industry at some point in their careers, and many will go back to work in the defense industry.

Then there are arms sales to foreign governments. Lawrence Wittner cites a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that found that sales of weapons and military services by the world’s largest 100 corporate military suppliers totaled $375 billion in 2016. “U.S. corporations increased their share of that total to almost 58 percent, supplying weapons to at least 100 nations around the world.”

Eager to promote the arms industry, government officials work hard on their behalf. As Hartung explains: From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.”

More for the military and less for everything else

The federal budget is divided into three categories: mandatory spending (primarily social security and medicare), discretionary spending, and interest on the debt. Two trends in discretionary spending, the component of the budget set each year at the discretion of Congress, offer a window on how militarism is squeezing out funding for programs that serve majority needs.

The first noteworthy trend is the growing Congressional support for defense (base military budget) over non-defense programs. In 2001, the majority of discretionary funds went to non-defense programs, However, that soon changed, as we see in the chart below, thanks to the “war on terror.” In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50 percent, while spending on every other government program increased by only 13.5 percent.

In the 2018 federal budget, 54 percent of discretionary funds are allocated to the military (narrowly defined), $700 billion to the military and $591 billion to non-military programs. The chart below shows President Trump’s discretionary budgetary request for fiscal year 2019. As we can see, the share of funds for the military would rise to 61 percent of the total.

According to the National Priorities Project, “President Trump’s proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress, would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending [in the discretionary budget] would soar to 65 percent.” Of course, militarism’s actual share is much greater, since the military is being defined quite narrowly. For example, Veterans’ Benefits is included in the non-defense category.

The second revealing trend is the decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to GDP. Thus, not only is the military base budget growing more rapidly than the budget for nondefense programs, spending on discretionary non-defense programs is not even keeping up with the growth in the economy. This trend translates into a declining public capacity to support research and development and infrastructure modernization, as well as meet growing needs for housing, education, health and safety, disaster response . . . the list is long.

The 2018 bipartisan budget deal increased discretionary spending for both defense and non-defense programs, but the deal did little to reverse this long run decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to the size of the economy. A Progressive Policy Institute blog post by Ben Ritz explains:

The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) capped both categories of discretionary spending as part of a broader effort to reduce future deficits. When Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on taxes and other categories of federal spending, the BCA automatically triggered an even deeper, across-the-board cut to discretionary spending known as sequestration. While the sequester has been lifted several times since it first took effect, discretionary spending consistently remained far below the original BCA caps.

That trend ended with the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (BBA). This budget deal not only lifted discretionary spending above sequester levels – it also went above and beyond the original BCA caps for two years. Nevertheless, projected domestic discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2019 is significantly below the historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product. Moreover, even if policymakers extended these policy changes beyond the two years covered by the BBA, we project that domestic discretionary spending could fall to just 3 percent of GDP within the next decade – the lowest level in modern history [see dashed black line in chart below].

The story is similar for defense spending. Thanks to the pressure put on by the sequester, defense discretionary spending fell to just under 3.1 percent of GDP in FY2017. Under the BBA, defense spending would increase to 3.4 percent of GDP in FY2019 before falling again [see dashed black line in following chart]. Unlike domestic discretionary spending, however, defense would remain above the all-time low it reached before the 2001 terrorist attacks throughout the next decade.

In sum, Congress appears determined to squeeze non-defense programs, increasingly privileging defense over non-defense spending in the discretionary budget and allowing non-defense spending as a share of GDP to fall to record lows. The ratio of discretionary defense spending relative to GDP appears to be stabilizing, although at levels below its long-term average. However, discretionary defense spending refers only to the base budget of the Department of Defense and as such is a seriously understated measure of the costs of US militarism. Including the growing costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, and the overseas contingency operations fund, would result in a far different picture, one that would leave no doubt about the government’s bipartisan commitment to militarism.

The challenge ahead

Fighting militarism is not easy. Powerful political and business forces have made great strides in converting the United States into a society that celebrates violence, guns, and the military. The chart below highlights one measure of this success. Sadly, 39 percent of Americans polled support increasing our national defense while 46 percent think it is just about right. Only 13 percent think it is stronger than it needs to be.

Polls, of course, just reveal individual responses at a moment in time to questions that, in isolation, often provide respondents with no meaningful context or alternatives and thus reveal little about people’s true thoughts. At the same time, results like this show just how important it is for us to work to create space for community conversations that are informed by accurate information on the extent and aims of US militarism and its enormous political, social, economic, and ecological costs for the great majority of working people.

These are supposed to be the good times—with our current economic expansion poised to set a record as the longest in US history. Yet, according to the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017, forty percent of American adults don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense such as an unexpected medical bill, car problem or home repair.

The problem with our economy isn’t that it sometimes hits a rough patch. It’s that people struggle even when it is setting records.

The expansion is running out of steam

Our current economic expansion has already gone 107 months. Only one expansion has lasted longer: the expansion from March 1991 to March 2001 which lasted 120 months.

A CNBC Market Insider report by Patti Domm quotes Goldman Sachs economists as saying: “The likelihood that the expansion will break the prior record is consistent with our long-standing view that the combination of a deep recession and an initially slow recovery has set us up for an unusually long cycle.”

The Goldman Sachs model, according to Domm:

shows an increased 31 percent chance for a U.S. recession in the next nine quarters. That number is rising. But it’s a good news, bad news story, and the good news is there is now a two-thirds chance that the recovery will be the longest on record. . . . The Goldman economists also say the medium-term risk of a recession is rising, “mainly because the economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.”

The chart below highlights the growing recession risk based on a Goldman Sachs model that looks at “lagged GDP growth, the slope of the yield curve, equity price changes, house price changes, the output gap, the private debt/GDP ratio, and economic policy uncertainty.”

Sooner or later, the so-called good times are coming to an end. Tragically, a large percent of Americans are still struggling at a time when our “economy is at full employment and still growing above trend.” That raises the question: what’s going to happen to them and millions of others when the economy actually turns down?

Living on the edge

The Federal Reserve’s report was based on interviews with a sample of over 12,000 people that was “designed to be representative of adults ages 18 and older living in the United States.” One part of the survey dealt with unexpected expenses. Here is what the report found:

Approximately four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money. The following figure shows that the share of Americans facing financial insecurity has been falling, but it is still alarming that the percentage remains so high this late in a record setting expansion.

Strikingly, the Federal Reserve survey also found, as shown in the table below, that “(e)ven without an unexpected expense, 22 percent of adults expected to forgo payment on some of their bills in the month of the survey. Most frequently, this involves not paying, or making a partial payment on, a credit card bill.”

And, as illustrated in the figure below, twenty-seven percent of adult Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2017 because they were unable to afford its cost. The table that follows shows that “dental care was the most frequently skipped treatment, followed by visiting a doctor and taking prescription medicines.”

Clearly, we need more and better jobs and a stronger social safety net. Achieving those will require movement building. Needed first steps include helping those struggling see that their situation is not unique, a consequence of some individual failing, but rather is the result of the workings of a highly exploitative system that suffers from ever stronger stagnation tendencies. And this requires creating opportunities for people to share experiences and develop their will and capacity to fight for change. In this regard, there may be much to learn from the operation of the Councils of the Unemployed during the 1930s.

It also requires creating opportunities for struggle. Toward that end we need to help activists build connections between ongoing labor and community struggles, such as the ones that education and health care workers are making as they fight for improved conditions of employment and progressive tax measures to fund a needed expansion of public services. This is the time, before the next downturn, to lay the groundwork for a powerful movement for social transformation.

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This post was updated May 31, 2018. The original post misstated the length of the current expansion.

People tend to have a distorted picture of US capitalism’s operation, believing that the great majority of Americans are doing well, benefiting from the system’s long-term growth and profit generation. Unfortunately, this is not true. Median wealth has been declining, leaving growing numbers of working people increasingly vulnerable to the ups and downs of economic activity and poorly positioned to enjoy a secure retirement. Moreover, this general trend masks a profound racial wealth divide, with people of color disproportionally suffering from a loss of wealth and insecurity.

A distorted picture of wealth inequality

In a 2011 article, based on 2005 national survey data, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely demonstrate how little Americans know about the extent of wealth inequality. The figure below (labeled Fig. 2) shows the actual distribution of wealth in that year compared to what survey respondents thought it was, as well as their ideal wealth distribution. As the authors explain:

respondents vastly underestimated the actual level of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest quintile held about 59% of the wealth when the actual number is closer to 84%. More interesting, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution, reporting a desire for the top quintile to own just 32% of the wealth. These desires for more equal distributions of wealth took the form of moving money from the top quintile to the bottom three quintiles, while leaving the second quintile unchanged, evincing a greater concern for the less fortunate than the more fortunate.

The next figure reveals that respondents tended to have remarkably similar perceptions of wealth distribution regardless of their income, political affiliation, or gender. Moreover, all the groups embraced remarkably similar ideal distributions that were far more egalitarian than their estimated ones.

Capitalist wealth dynamics

Wealth inequality has only grown worse since 2005. As I previously posted, in 2016, the top 10 percent of the population owned 77.1 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 10 percent owned -0.5 percent (they are net debtors). Even these numbers understate the degree of wealth concentration: the top 1 percent actually owned 38.5 percent of the wealth, more than the bottom 90 percent combined. This was a sharp rise from the 29.9 percent share they held in 1989.

Perhaps more importantly, median household wealth is not only quite small–not nearly enough to provide financial stability and security–but is actually growing smaller over time. In fact, median household wealth in 2016 was 8 percent below what it had been in 1998.

The racial wealth divide

Of course, not all families receive equal treatment or are given similar opportunities for advancement. While US capitalism works to transfer wealth upwards to the very rich, it has disproportionately exploited families of color. This is made clear by the results of a 2017 study titled The Road to Zero Wealth by Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emanuel Nieves.

As we saw above, median household wealth has been on the decline since 2007, despite the growth in overall economic activity and corporate profits. The figure below shows median wealth trends for White, Black, and Latino households.

As of 2013, median White household wealth was less than it had been in 1989. However, the wealth decline has been far worse for Black and Latino families. More specifically, as the authors write:

Since 1983, the respective wealth of Black and Latino families has plunged from $6,800 and $4,000 in 1983 to $1,700 and $2,000 in 2013. These figures exclude durable goods like automobiles and electronics, as these items depreciate quickly in value and do not hold the same liquidity, stability or appreciation of other financial assets like a savings account, a treasury bond or a home.

Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, with higher levels of education translating into more income, and then wealth. But as we see in the figure below, the combination of class policies on top of a history of discrimination and exclusion has left families of color at a significant disadvantage. For example, the median wealth of a family of color with a head of household with 4 year degree is far less than the median wealth of a White family with a head of household with only a high school diploma/GED.

The authors have created their own measure of “middle class wealth,” which they define:

using median White household wealth since it encompasses the full potential of the nation’s wealth-building policies, which have historically excluded households of color. More specifically, we use median White wealth in 1983 ($102,200 in 2013 dollars) as the basis for developing an index that would encompass “middle-class wealth” because it establishes a baseline prior to when increases in wealth were concentrated in a small number of households. Using this approach and applying Pew Research Center’s broad definition of the middle class, this study defines “middle class wealth” as ranging from $68,000 to $204,000.

As we can see in the figure above, only Black and Latino households with an advanced degree make it into that range. Moreover, trends suggest that, without major changes in policy, we can expect further declines in median wealth for households of color. In fact,

By 2020, if current trends continue as they have been, Black and Latino households at the median are on track to see their wealth decline by 17% and 12% from where they respectively stood in 2013. By then, median White households would see their wealth rise by an additional three percent over today’s levels. In other words, at a time when it’s projected that children of color will make up most of the children in the country, median White households are on track to own 86 and 68 times more wealth, respectively, than Black and Latino households. . . .

Looking beyond 2043, the situation for households of color looks even worse. . . .If unattended, trends at the median suggest Black household wealth will hit zero by 2053. In that same period, median White household wealth is expected to climb to $137,000. The situation isn’t much brighter for Latino households, whose median wealth is expected to reach zero by 2073, just two decades after Black wealth is projected to hit zero. . . . Wealth is an intergenerational asset—its benefits passed down from one generation to the next— and the consequences of these losses will reverberate deeply in the lives of the children and grandchildren of today’s people of color.

Of course, knowledge of the fact that capitalism’s growth largely benefits capitalists, and that people of color pay some of the greatest costs to sustain its forward motion, does not automatically lead to class solidarity and popular opposition to existing accumulation dynamics. Still, such knowledge does, at a minimum, help people understand that the forces pressing down on them are not the result of individual failure or lack of effort, but rather have systemic roots. And that is an important step in the right direction.

The media likes to frame the limits of political struggle as between the Democratic and Republican parties, as if each side upholds a radically different political vision. However, in a number of key areas, leaders of both parties are happy to unite around an anti-worker agenda. Support for the military and an aggressive foreign policy is one such area.

On September 18, US senators approved the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2018. Donald Trump had proposed increasing the military budget by $54 billion. The Senate voted 89-9 to increase it by $37 billion more than Trump sought. In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill on Monday that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”

The NDAA calls for giving $640 billion to the Pentagon for its basic operations and another $60 billion for war operations in other countries, including Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. The House passed its own version of the bill, which included a smaller increase over Trump’s request as well as new initiatives such as the creation of a Space Corps not supported by the Senate. Thus, the House and Senate need to reconcile their differences before the bill goes to President Trump for his signature.

It is clear that Democratic Party opposition to Trump does not include opposition to US militarism and imperialism. As Ajamu Baraka points out:

Opposition to Trump has been framed in ways that supports the agenda of the Democratic Party—but not the anti-war agenda. Therefore, anti-Trumpism does not include a position against war and U.S. imperialism.

When the Trump administration proposed what many saw as an obscene request for an additional $54 billion in military spending, we witnessed a momentary negative response from some liberal Democrats. The thinking was that this could be highlighted as yet another one of the supposedly demonic moves by the administration and it was added to the talking points for the Democrats. That was until 117 Democrats voted with Republicans in the House—including a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus—to not only accept the administration’s proposal, but to exceed it by $18 billion. By that point, the Democrats went silent on the issue.

It is important to keep in mind that, as William D. Hartung shows, “there are hundreds of billions of dollars in ‘defense’ spending that aren’t even counted in the Pentagon budget.” Hartung goes agency by agency to show the “hidden” spending. As he notes:

You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal — nuclear warheads — would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget. And you would, of course, be wrong. The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year.

Hartung’s grand total, which includes, among other things, the costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, and the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, is $1.09 Trillion. In short, our political leaders are far from forthcoming about the true size of our military spending.

Militarization comes home

Opponents of this huge military budget are right to stress how it greatly increases the dangers of war and the harm our military interventions do to people in other countries, but the costs of militarism are also felt by those living in the United States.

For example, ever escalating military budgets fund ever new and more deadly weapons of destruction, and much of the outdated equipment is sold to police departments, contributing to the militarization of our police and the growing use of force on domestic opponents of administration policies, the poor, and communities of color. As Lisa Wade explains:

In 1996, the federal government passed a law giving the military permission to donate excess equipment to local police departments. Starting in 1998, millions of dollars worth of equipment was transferred each year, as shown in the figure below. Then, after 9/11, there was a huge increase in transfers. In 2014, they amounted to the equivalent of 796.8 million dollars.

Those concerned about police violence worried that police officers in possession of military equipment would be more likely to use violence against civilians, and new research suggests that they’re right.

Political scientist Casey Delehanty and his colleagues compared the number of civilians killed by police with the monetary value of transferred military equipment across 455 counties in four states. Controlling for other factors (e.g., race, poverty, drug use), they found that killings rose along with increasing transfers. In the case of the county that received the largest transfer of military equipment, killings more than doubled.

Militarization squeezes nondefense social spending

Growing military spending also squeezes spending on vital domestic social services, including housing, health, education, and employment protections, as critical programs and agencies are starved for funds in the name of fiscal responsibility.

The federal budget is made up of nondiscretionary and discretionary spending. Nondiscretionary spending is mandated by existing legislation, for example, interest payments on the national debt. Discretionary spending is not, and thus its allocation among programs clearly reveals Congressional priorities. The biggest divide in the discretionary budget is between defense and nondefense discretionary spending.

The nondefense discretionary budget is, as explained by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

the main budget area that invests in the nation’s future productivity, supporting education, basic research, job training, and infrastructure. It also supports priorities such as providing housing and child care assistance to low- and moderate-income families, protecting against infectious diseases, enforcing laws that protect workers and consumers, and caring for national parks and other public lands. A significant share of this funding comes in the form of grants to state and local governments.

As we see below, nondefense discretionary appropriations have fallen dramatically in real terms and could potentially fall to a low of $516 billion if Congress does not waive the sequestration caps established in 2011.

The decline is even more dramatic when measured relative to GDP. Under the caps and sequestration currently in place, nondefense spending in 2017 equaled 3.2 percent of GDP, just 0.1 percentage point above the lowest percentage on record going back to 1962. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “That percentage will continue to fall if the caps and sequestration remain unchanged, equaling the previous record low of 3.1 percent in 2018 and then continuing to fall (see the figure below).”

Looking ahead

As the next figure shows, the proposed Trump budget would intensify the attack on federal domestic social programs and agencies.

If approved, it “would take nondefense discretionary spending next year to its lowest level in at least six decades as a percentage of the economy and, by 2027, to its lowest on that basis since the Hoover Administration — possibly even earlier.” Of course, some categories of the proposed nondefense discretionary budget are slated for growth–veterans’ affairs and homeland security–which means that the squeeze on other programs would be worse than the aggregate numbers suggest.

No doubt the Democratic Party will mount a fierce struggle to resist the worst of Trump’s proposed cuts, and they are likely to succeed. But the important point is that the trend of militarizing our federal budget and society more generally will likely continue, a trend encouraged by past Democratic as well as Republican administrations.

If we are to advance our movement for social change, we need to do a better job of building a strong grassroots movement in opposition to militarism. Among other things, that requires us to do a better job communicating all the ways in which militarism sets us back, in particular the ways in which militarism promotes racism and social division, globalization and economic decay, and the deterioration of our environment and quality of life, as well as death abroad and at home, all in the interest of corporate profits. In other words, we have to find more effective ways of drawing together our various struggles for peace, jobs, and justice.

The following graphic from the HowMuch webpage puts into sharp relief the difficulties most workers face trying to live a decent life. Drawing on a number of databases, the graphic illustrates, by city, the amount of money a “typical American working-class family” would have at year’s end assuming “a reasonable standard of living.”

As the site explains:

Each bubble represents a city. The color corresponds to the amount of money a typical working-class family would have left over at the end of the year after paying for their living costs, like housing, food and transportation. The darker the shade of red, the worse off you are. The darker the shade of green, the better off you are. The size of the bubble also fits on a sliding scale—large and dark red means the city is totally unaffordable. Bigger dark green bubbles likewise indicate a city where the working class can get by.

The site defines its typical American working-class family as having four members: two adults (both in their 30s) and two children (ages 4 and 8 years). The adults, who work full-time, have salaries equal to the median city earnings of their assigned professions, home appliance repairer and manicurist. The family lives on a Department of Agriculture low-cost food plan and rents a 1500 square foot apartment.

It turns out that in only one of the ten largest American cities would it be possible for a working-class family to enjoy a decent standard of living without taking on debt: San Antonio. Only 12 of the top 50 largest cities would be affordable.

Here are the five worse cities (from a financial perspective) and the debt that would be required for the family to achieve the target standard of living:

New York, NY (-$91,184)

San Francisco, CA (-$83,272)

Boston, MA (-$61,900)

Washington, DC (-$50,535)

Philadelphia, PA (-$37,850)

As Raul, the author of the page notes: “You read that correctly. The typical working-class family would need an additional $91K+ per year in New York City just to break even on a reasonable standard of living.”

Of course, workers can’t run up such debts. So, they do what they have to do to survive—they abandon any hope of having a reasonable standard of living. They move far from their workplace and travel long distances to work, seek additional employment, economize further on meals, place their children in less than ideal day care situations, and crowd into small apartments, all of which take their toll.

And with wages continuing to stagnate, the Trump administration determined to slash spending on social services and roll back workplace protections, and a recession looming, the struggle for a decent life is not going to get easier.

The great majority of working people in the US have experienced tough times over the last few decades. And all signs point to the fact that those in power are committed to policies that will mean a further deterioration in majority living and working conditions.

One obvious response to this situation is organizing; working people need strong organizations that are capable of building the broad alliances and advancing the new visions necessary to challenge and transform existing political-economic relationships and institutions. Building such organizations requires, as a first step, both acknowledging the existence of the working class and taking the concerns of its members seriously.

Unfortunately, as Reeve Vanneman shows in a Sociological Images blog post, writers appear to have largely abandoned use of the term “working class.” One indicator is the trend illustrated in the chart below, which is derived from Google Books’ Ngram Viewer. The Ngram Viewer is able to display a graph showing how often a particular word or phrase appears in a category of books over selected years. In this case, the chart below shows how often the two-word phrase “working class” (a bigram) appears as a percentage of all two word phrases used in all books written in American English.

As Vanneman explains:

a Google ngram count of the phrase “working class” in American books shows a spike in the Depression Thirties and an even stronger growth from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. But after the mid-1970s, there is a steady decline, implying a lack of discussion just as their problems were growing.

A similar overall trend emerges from “a count of the frequencies of ‘working class’ in the titles or abstracts of articles in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.” As we see in the chart below, there was a rapid growth in the use of the phrase from the late 1950s through most of the 1960s, followed by a slow but steady decline until the mid-1980s, and then, after a brief resurgence, a dramatic fall off in its use.

As Vanneman comments: “These articles on the working class were not insignificant; even through the 21st century, the authors include a number of ASA presidents. But overall, working-class issues seem to have lost their salience, as if even American sociology was also telling them that they didn’t matter.”

While there is no simple relationship between working class activism and scholarship on the working class, the synergy is important. Now is the time to take working class issues seriously. Given current trends, we desperately need a revival of labor activism and the development of labor-community alliances around issues such as housing, health care, discrimination, and the environment. And we also need new scholarship that shines a light on as well as engages the challenges of our time from a working class standpoint.